_________________An Adventurer's strength flows from the Point'n'Click Force.But beware The Dark Side my friend.Anger,rage,aggression.The dark side of the gaming Force are they.Easily they flow,quick to join you in a fight.If once you start down the dark path of RPGs, Action-Adventures or . . eek! . . Casual Games (brrr!),forever will it dominate your destiny.Consume you it will,as it did Ethel,of whom we dare not speak for fear of instant expulsion from our true faith of Point'n'Click.

Last edited by Gelert on Sun Jan 13, 2013 11:48 am; edited 5 times in total

This is not a new purchase... but I did buy a Dell laptop XPS M1730 from the Dell outlet store... I have had it for a number of years now and it serves me just fine. I play mostly adventure games so the video card works well. I know there have been some problems with this card in Dell laptops but fortunately I have had none. I prefer a desktop but with the traveling I do I need a laptop.

This is not a new purchase... but I did buy a Dell laptop XPS M1730 from the Dell outlet store... I have had it for a number of years now and it serves me just fine. I play mostly adventure games so the video card works well. I know there have been some problems with this card in Dell laptops but fortunately I have had none. I prefer a desktop but with the traveling I do I need a laptop.

While accessing my ebay purchases archives and attempting to make the ebay page show up so I could get the specs, I was clicking on the "more actions" for this purchase listing, the seller's name, etc, and I hope I didn't accidentally click on something that would cause the seller to think I wanted to return the laptop, or worse yet, click on something that indicated "sell one like this" (shudder!!)

I got this laptop in April 2011, and am very happy with it, I want to keep it.

What are your specs for your Dell XPS M1730, Winfrey? How much did you pay for it? Are you a tech missionary, or in any kind of missionary field?

I know that someday when I'm a tech I want to go into the tech missionary field but I'll buy a "special-purpose laptop only to travel on the missionary field" when the tme comes and leave my regular laptops at home, make CD/DVD images of all games that I'm taking aboard with me so I'll have no regrets in the event that I lose the computer/games.

EDIT - Just checked on my ebay profile - no recent "sent" mesages to the seller of laptop, no kinds of selling listings appearing in my profile - so I believe I can rest easy, as no harm done.

Well, I bought Mrs Gelert an ASUS laptop for Christmas .... as part of my cunning plan to divert her from 'breaking' my PC.

So, not directly game-related, but it should lead me to playing a little more and without any preliminary debugging of my PC.

_________________An Adventurer's strength flows from the Point'n'Click Force.But beware The Dark Side my friend.Anger,rage,aggression.The dark side of the gaming Force are they.Easily they flow,quick to join you in a fight.If once you start down the dark path of RPGs, Action-Adventures or . . eek! . . Casual Games (brrr!),forever will it dominate your destiny.Consume you it will,as it did Ethel,of whom we dare not speak for fear of instant expulsion from our true faith of Point'n'Click.

I've no idea. She keeps telling me to shut up because she's using it! LOL!

....Heaven for Gelert.

_________________An Adventurer's strength flows from the Point'n'Click Force.But beware The Dark Side my friend.Anger,rage,aggression.The dark side of the gaming Force are they.Easily they flow,quick to join you in a fight.If once you start down the dark path of RPGs, Action-Adventures or . . eek! . . Casual Games (brrr!),forever will it dominate your destiny.Consume you it will,as it did Ethel,of whom we dare not speak for fear of instant expulsion from our true faith of Point'n'Click.

I gifted myself with a Kindle Fire for Christmas. Oh, boy, do I ever like it! I have two desktops I've built and I really don't need a laptop, but I did want to be a bit more mobile. This is just the ticket for me and not too expensive. Love it!

Yeah, the regular Kindles have different prices. The $79 one comes with advertising on it. The Kindle Fire is the new tablet and it is one price only - $199. The regular kindles are pretty much for reading only. The Fire has a ton of apps, web surfing, email, movies, magazines plus I have all my books from my account for the free Kindle for PC. Scenic Regional Library just started letting you check out Kindle books a month or so ago. It's great!

Yeah, the regular Kindles have different prices. The $79 one comes with advertising on it. The Kindle Fire is the new tablet and it is one price only - $199. The regular kindles are pretty much for reading only. The Fire has a ton of apps, web surfing, email, movies, magazines plus I have all my books from my account for the free Kindle for PC. Scenic Regional Library just started letting you check out Kindle books a month or so ago. It's great!

Glad you're happy with it Drac !! I've been seeing the Kindle Fire , along with the Barnes & Noble "Nook" in commercials lately . What advertising does the regular Kindle contain ? All I would really use a Kindle for anyway , would be reading . I have a friend who is an author , & if I'm not mistaken , has 3 books available on Kindle so far , with a 4th on the way .

It's only the lowest price Kindle that has the advertising on it. I really don't know how much there is or how annoying it is either. My son got a Nook Tablet for Christmas and about the only difference between it and the Fire is the 16 GB of storage vs the 8 GB of storage on the Fire. Well, that and another $50 for the Nook. But you get tons of Cloud storage with the Fire that you don't get with the Nook.

You might try going to Amazon and reading the reviews for the cheap Kindle and see what people have to say about the advertising.

I am very satisfied with it! My next move will probably be an Intel SSD.

Not too bad at all tsampikos !

I'm going to try to upgrade my video card in the next month or two . I had looked at a gtx 580 (1.5 GB ddr5) , but considering the price , I can get a good used gtx 480 for cheaper on Amazon or ebay . From what I've read in reviews & performance comparisons , there's not much difference , except in power consumption & thermals . My case has 5 fans , so I'm good to go for cooling !

tsampikos, are you going to use the future SSD for a boot drive or a cache drive? Your Z68 motherboard has Intel Smart Response Technology which allows you to use a smaller SSD as a cache drive and your HDDs for everything else. The reads are very fast with the writes not quite as fast as you would be writing to both drives. I set this up on the build I did after Christmas with my grandson. Wow, is it ever fast! There is an option to not write to both drives to which speeds things up even more.